[Zope] Using Zope and Worldpilot on a large site

[Paolo Bizzarri]

Bill Anderson wrote:
> 
> Paolo Bizzarri wrote:
> >
> > Hi Zopers,
> >
> > we would like to use Zope for an ISP, with more than 400.000 customers.
> > Zope would be used with Worldpilot, in order to provide Webmail,
> > Calendar, to do, etc.
> 
> THis demonstrates a problem or two with Worldpilot. I would defintiely _not_ use
> worldpilot in that setting. Why not? Well, the sharing capability (IIRC) gives a list of
> people on the system you can share with. Think about that for a moment. Four hundred
> thousand people. One list. It would  be nice if it were possible for people to not appear
> in the list, and for there to be groups.
> 
Yes, this is a problem. As a first step, we are going to remove sharing
from Worldpilot (disabling it). Then we would like to give customers the
possibility to "create" their own groups and subgroups, so that they can
build their own "company-on-the-web".
> >
> > Has anyone tried the scalability of Zope till this level ?
> 
> Well, what you are describing really isn't a test of Zope's scaleability.
> , but rather workdpilots (and the machines's).
> 
> Zope's scalability in this case is more a matter of resource usage, than a funtion of the
> number of users. Thats is to say, what is the expected load of the machine/site. 400,000
> users will not access all at once, will they? Zope can be scaled accross multiple
> machines, through the use of ZEO, so if your load gets too high, you can move to a ZEO
> solution, adding machines as neccessary.
> 
As far as I can understand, ZEO is still in alpha/beta stage, so I am
not sure to use it immediately.

> One caveat to that is that worldpilot stores data on the filesystem, so that data would
> need replicated accross the sites. Perhaps NFS or Coda could server this function.
> 
There is one more problem. Worldpilot create a directory for each user.
For 400.000 users this means 400.000 directories, which is not nice for
Linux+ext2 (and in general I am not sure I want a directory with 400.000
files inside).

So we are considering either hacking WP, so that it creates something
like a p/a/paolo directory for the paolo user, or moving data to a
relational database. The latter could be the preferred solution, but it
could become a too long step right now. So probably we are going to use
the former.

BTW, I have seen WP has the directory /var/spool/worldpilot that is hard
coded into the code. Perhaps we could create a configuration file for
WP, in which one can specify these directories.

Ciao

Paolo

-- 
Paolo Bizzarri - Responsabile Marketing  I3 Icube Srl
Sede:   Via Ridolfi 15 - 56124 Pisa (PI), Italia 
E-mail: p.bizzarri@icube.it		WWW: www.icube.it	
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